After a DDH keynote at RailsConf that concentrated a lot of disdain on books "for Dummies" it's interesting to note that a year after its release the Asset Pipeline still calls for explanatory posts like this one among even experienced Rails developers.

Rails 3 already uses HTML5 data-attributes to deal with things like AJAX calls on forms through the jQuery-UJS gem. This gem by Josh Peek from GitHub is a modular alternative which uses existing global AJAX events, is written in CoffeeScript and plays well with jQuery as well as the faster Zepto library.

Mike Pack dropped us a line about a new article he wrote called Exhibit vs Presenter. Both are a form of the decorator pattern. The more familiar Presenters wrap an object and aid in its presentation. In the context of Rails you might use a Presenter class to help display a specific model across different views and keep your view or presentation logic out of the views and the models. Exhibits, on the other hand, connect a model object with a context to render it, without knowing about the view.

Rails 3.2 brought automatic explains for slow queries a few month back, Marginalia — a little gem built by the 37signals team — embellishes the idea by tagging query in your log with the application, controller and action which generated it. In a recent blog post the 37signals guys said they use this in production, not just in development, to make it easier to debug support issues and operations.

Two new features that were discussed at RailsConf last week are already in Edge Rails (the master branch on Rails’ GitHub repo). The new job Queue is an attempt to expose a single interface to queueing within Rails and allow existing queuing libraries like Resque, delayed_job, AMPQ, or Sidekiq to plug into it. The second worthy addition last week end was the possibility to break routes into separate files, so you can for instance have an admin namespace with a separate routes file.

At RailsConf we talked to Santiago Pastorino, one of contributors to Rails::API, a new gem for creating API-only application with hand picked components from Rails which was recently released for people who need to build JavaScript-heavy applications with frameworks like Backbone and Ember.

Santiago says the team needs more tests and performance cases to prove the 20 to 30% speed boost compared to Rails the experienced so far. This gem may become a generator on Rails core so that people who need APIs get a great one.

If you want to learn more about the talks from RailsConf, and just can’t wait for the videos, you might want to check-out the unofficial RailsConf Wiki. It contains a bunch of talk summaries, discussions, slide/video/presenter links, mentioned gems, and more.

Previous Episodes

A whole squad of Ruby5 hosts reports from RailsConf 2012 in Austin. We discuss the DHH keynote, Rails on Roombas, the fact that Confreaks is now filming all talks, progressive enhancement on mobile, sharing your appreciation to community contributors and the Ruby Hero Awards ceremony.